The Interlude

President Barack Obama’s most elemental legacy was sealed on November 4, 2008, when a nation that had enslaved and disenfranchised blacks for centuries made a young African-American man its leader in a crushing landslide. That day, what Martin Luther King Jr. famously referred to as the promissory note of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution had, at least in our national politics, finally been redeemed.

As for the rest of Obama’s legacy, much of it is TBD. This year’s presidential election is, in large part, a contest over what will become of it—meaning Obama will have more at stake on November 8 than anyone but the contenders themselves. If Hillary Clinton wins, she will presumably be George H.W. Bush to Obama’s Ronald Reagan, establishing the durability of Obama’s electoral coalition, preserving his domestic policies from rapid reversal and perhaps forcing major changes in the GOP. If she loses, the Obama presidency will look more like an extravagant interlude, a gamble on a leftward lurch that devastated the Democratic Party at the congressional and state level without creating an enduring legacy at the federal one.

Story Continued Below

Whatever happens, we already know Obama will be remembered for a few things besides the historic nature of his election. Most importantly, he will be associated with the new ascendancy of cultural liberalism. Consider how the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, played defense on cultural politics. He was the guy who signed the Defense of Marriage Act; Obama is the guy who lit up the White House in rainbow colors. Clinton signed the 1994 crime bill that supposedly funded 100,000 new cops; Obama has given rhetorical support and comfort to the often frankly antipolice movement Black Lives Matter. The Obama administration has pushed the mandate that insurance cover contraceptives, and got entangled in major litigation over it with an order of nuns. It has demonstrated hostility to religious liberty and, through its Title IX policy, has empowered and at times cheered on the perfervid campus left, hailing, for example, the pointless defenestration of the president of the University of Missouri for vague offenses against political correctness.

Obama the liberal culture warrior is, in part, a function of his political base, what journalist Ronald Brownstein calls the “coalition of the ascendant”—the minority, young and affluent white voters who powered his election and reelection. Whether this coalition is the linchpin of an enduring Democratic advantage in presidential elections is one of the questions that will be answered in November. Regardless, it has cemented the indispensability of identity politics to the Democrats. To win, they must slice and dice the electorate and energize their favored bits of it, often through the politics of fear—the police dogs and the men in the white hoods are always lurking just out of view. This is why racism has been such a ready accusation during the Obama era, and why Clinton will lean as heavily on the charge of sexism when she is, inevitably, challenged and criticized. The Democrats have become the party of micro-aggression.

Obama’s pose as a nonideological moderate was never true to the man beneath it.

More broadly, Obama will leave a more polarized electorate than when he took office. He is part of a steady entrenchment of the red-blue divide that began with the late-term Bill Clinton and ran through the Bush years. Obama’s defenders say this is the fault of his unhinged detractors, but Obama never had any interest in compromise unless it was entirely on his own terms. He has been a divider, not a uniter.

***

In retrospect, his signature speech at the Democratic convention in 2004, in which he famously said that there are no red states or blue states, was one of the most soaring exercises in false advertising in recent political history. Obama’s pose as a nonideological moderate was never true to the man beneath it. On spending, health care and financial regulation in the first half of his first term, he pushed the left-most plausible version he could on everything.

Foremost among his goals was universal health insurance, although that’s not what Obamacare ended up providing. It has covered about 18 million additional people, but at unnecessary disruption (throwing millions off their existing coverage) and cost (more than a trillion dollars over 10 years). The administration expects to have 10 million people signed up on the exchanges by the end of 2016, half of what had been the June 2015 Congressional Budget Office estimate. Roughly another 10 million have signed up for Medicaid. For a sense of scale, consider that CHIP, an insurance program for children passed in the Clinton administration, today covers about 8 million.